This invention relates generally to database management processes, and more particularly, the present invention relates to a method for determining active part numbers and maintaining a current data repository for active part numbers in a manufacturing environment.
The technology of e-commerce and the expanding global marketplace has placed new challenges on the electronics industry. With traditional geographic barriers relating to trade breaking down, manufacturers are now being faced with a barrage of business choices and purchasing options, ranging from selecting office suppliers to Internet service and applications providers. Many manufacturing enterprises are taking advantage of this global marketplace and measurably cutting costs by outsourcing their production processes to other manufacturers. By cutting costs, these businesses are able to become more competitive, selling finished products at lower prices.
Although e-commerce has offered many commercial advantages, its rapid and steady growth has created some difficulties for the manufacturing industry. For example, older proprietary and legacy computer systems were not equipped to transition well into the new age of Internet technology. These systems typically operated incompatible software and employed disparate hardware devices which were unable to communicate with one another. Costly upgrades and extensive customization were necessary before these older systems could be leveraged into the new economy. To add to the frustration, global manufacturers with multiple geographically dispersed manufacturing sites and disparate manufacturing systems created islands of automation among them. These decentralized business units operated independently of one another, often employing incompatible business schemes requiring substantial integration measures before the global enterprise could effectively operate as a single entity.
The supply chain management processes of the manufacturing industry were not immune from the challenges created by this globalized market. Manufacturers continue to struggle to ensure that their design, development, and procurement groups are in sync with respect to the demand, availability, and financial aspects of their core parts and components requirements. A typical manufacturing enterprise may store hundreds of thousands of parts in its databases. Some of them are actively used by the enterprise, while others may include older legacy parts, parts that have become obsolete, out of production, or are otherwise no longer used by the enterprise. Needless to say, the bulk of this ‘inactive’ information is not particularly useful to the enterprise, however, would require a tremendous amount of human capital to filter out the unwanted data from the desired data. Further, many fields of information relating to these parts data are time dependent in that their usefulness or value to the enterprise may change over time. This information would need to be continuously reviewed and updated as well. If no action were taken by the enterprise, on the other hand, this data would continue to accumulate in the system databases as new parts are entered and others become obsolete, resulting in clogged communications lines, slow searches, and almost certain retrieval of unwanted parts information. It is therefore desirable to identify active parts used by the enterprise so evaluation groups or councils for the enterprise can focus on the critical parts that require maintenance streamlining the database management processes related to parts data.